Budget Crises, Academic Change: A Fable

This essayist reads like he's been around the block a few times. Reading this article, while at times it may seem unpleasant, provides - if nothing else - some of the jaundiced perspective on planning and planning processes that you might expect to hear from many in any constituency:

Budget reduction processes offer special opportunities for change. In public universities, these moments of fiscal challenge prompt government representatives, coordinating boards, and other responsible observers to tell us to take advantage of the crisis to restructure the university and achieve better efficiency and accountability. The state may give us a mid-year budget cut and ask for a strategic realignment of our work, as if the university operated on a week by week cycle.

Most of us respond politely, even though we know nothing of the kind is possible. By December, every university has already spent about half of its budget and it has made commitments for much of the rest. If it is to give money back to the state, it must find it by scrounging around in supplies and expenses, canceling travel, postponing purchases of new computers, and perhaps not hiring some adjuncts and increasing class sizes. But strategic realignments? Not a chance.

...

Finally, the president creates a strategic and accountable realignment for the institution by cutting a little here and a little there, abolishing a program that has no supporters in the legislature and ready-to-retire tenured faculty, and eliminating building maintenance funds to avoid laying off any faculty.
The public relations office describes these moves as creative and visionary change, and the press hails the president as a wise and profound academic leader who has accomplished these fine things in an effective and accountable way without damaging important academic functions of the institution. Although the president knows that the campus’ deteriorating physical plant will become a major issue for the future, she also knows that she will be somewhere else when that happens.

And so ends the fable with a budget crisis averted, and a change process achieved.